And, there, under the spreading needles of the 22-foot-tall Douglas Fir, grown by Crystal Spring Tree Farm Lehighton, sat an early holiday gift for the 253-member General Assembly, top executive branch officials and judges: an automatic, inflation-adjusted bump to their base salaries.

The automatic raise, enshrined in state law since 1995, will bump the base salary for rank-and-file lawmakers to $87,180, a $702, or .81 percent, increase over this year's pay starting Dec. 1.

Legislative leaders, meanwhile, will see their salaries rise to $99,410 to $136,094, depending upon the position they hold.

Executive branch raises, which includes Gov. Tom Wolf, will kick in on Jan. 1.

There are a couple of things wrong with these automatic pay hikes - and we'll take each of them in turn.

We'll start with the fact that raises, at least in the private sector, are usually awarded for meritorious service. It's hard to argue that here.

The state House skedaddled out of town this week without taking a vote on a long-sought tax on Marcellus Shale natural gas drillers. Meanwhile, the revenue plan underpinning the $32 billion spending document that landed on Wolf's desk back in July is held together by borrowing and rosy projections on a massive expansion of gambling.

Then there's the scale of the raises. There's a $31,408 gap between the base salary of an average lawmaker and the state's $55,702 median family income. The chasm separating the average taxpayer and top-ranking legislative leaders is even wider.

And while the national economy is booming, wages have stayed depressingly stagnant. As Bloomberg News notes, even though unemployment is at its lowest level in 10 years (4.4 percent), average hourly wages only increased by 3 cents in August from the month before.

There's a lot to be said for shared pain. If their constituents' wages aren't rising, despite the economic growth, there's no reason for elected officials to receive an effectively merit-less pay increase.

Finally, the automatic vote absolves lawmakers of any responsibility for their actions.

If they're going to get a raise, they should step up and own it, taking a vote each year to raise their salaries so that taxpayers know exactly who supports such an action. That's true accountability and a responsible shepherding of the public purse.

Yes, Wolf, a Democrat, donates his raise to charity. Other public officials, wisely fearing the backlash, similarly donate their pay hikes to charity or write a check back to the Pennsylvania treasury.

And, yes, there's an argument to be made that an automatic raise will avert the kind of catastrophic breakdown in judgment that led to a notorious - and ultimately repealed - government pay raise of more than a decade ago.

But charitable donations or taxpayer giveback or no - the salary increase that elected officials receive starting Dec. 1 or Jan. 1 will still ultimately factor into the pension payout they receive when they hit retirement age.

There's a simple way to get around this ridiculous bit of political kabuki: Lawmakers should repeal the automatic raises.

If government officials think they deserve a pay bump, they should do the same thing the rest of us do: Marshal their arguments and portfolio of achievements, pluck up their nerve, and then go and try and justify it to their bosses.